Brian Curtis - B.S. Meteorology
Working on PhD. Computational Sciences and Informatics

Work

Research

I am a graduate student at George Mason University (GMU). I am a part of the department of computational and data sciences with a concentration in space sciences and astrophysics. I would like to focus on space weather prediction and modeling. My job is as a graduate research assistant under the advisement of Dr. Robert Weigel. I am currently assisting my advisor in his research on the effects of solar wind densities on the magnetosphere and ionosphere.

Magnetosphere	Ionosphere

Space Weather Forecast Contest

A side project I have been working on has been a space weather forecasting contest. In undergraduate studies I always had the availability to a local a national forecasting game in which you would forecast the max/min temp and the total precipitation for the next day and I wanted to bring something along the same lines to students studying space weather.

The idea of this contest is to forecast a few space weather parameters. In this case we are testing with the planetary K-index (max and min), and the bulk solar wind velocities (max and min). The hopes for this side project is to give students more exposure to space science, but it should mostly be a fun little game between students/staff around the country (maybe world eventually) to be the best.

SWFC Screenshot

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Ubuntu Linux

I've been glued to a computer for most of my life. Back when I was a child I would always play DOS games on my dads Tandy computer, and that along with the television would always keep me entertained. As I grew older and I tought myself more about computers and learned the Windows OS so well, I just got fed up with all of the problems that Windows gave me, and all of this money that I would have to spend to buy new software versions and get support.

Entering into college, I didn't know much about Linux, but had definitely heard about it. The meteorology program at SUNY Oswego gave me a hands on experience of Fedora Core and using basic Linux commands to access and use a meteorology program called GARP to analyze the terrestrial atmosphere. While taking a class on programming in meteorology, I gained knowledge in FORTRAN and C and I found out how much I loved being able to work with computers in such a way to solve basic meteorological problems that may have taken me a couple days to complete.

Finally, after finishing a summer internship at George Mason University with Dr. Weigel. I gained more experience with programming using the octave programming language. At that point he had me using SUSE linux. This internship helped me get a graduate assistant position, and thus continuing my education into graduate school. We started out using Redhat, as that is what came default with the computer I had purchased for me, but as Redhat kept giving us problems, I was introduced to Ubuntu Linux, at that time it was at version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), and I was glad to know that the OS was free and that all updates were free and that support could be gathered from a large user community whenever I needed it.

After about 6 months of playing around with Ubuntu and getting used to it, I had loved what I had been involved with and decided to start getting involved with Ubuntu in any way I possibly could. Over time I had gotten involved on Launchpad and learned about the Washington, D.C. Local Community (LoCo) and joined that in hopes that once I settled down in my new location, I could join others who were as enthusiastic as I was about Ubuntu Linux. Through hanging out with the LoCo on Freenode IRC, I had been introduced to a group of bug triagers, that would go and make sure that bugs reported in the Launchpad bug management database. Mackenzie Morgan has been a great help to me in getting started with bug traige.

Now, I have bee involved with bug triage for a while. I have been accepted into the Bug Control team, and have been participating more anhttp://aurora.gmu.edu/projects/index.php/Brian_Curtisd more in LoCo events so much that I have decided to host a Bug Jam at GMU. The combination of my bug traige and involvement with the DC LoCo, I have been accepted as a member of the Ubuntu community. It takes a sustained effort in the Ubuntu community to get this honor. Since this is only a hobby of mine, I hope that through time I can become more involved by managing packages or designing one of my own

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